Saving Mr. Lincoln

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National detective: Allan Pinkerton in 1862.CreditCreditCourtesy of the Library of Congress

By Greg Tobin

Feb. 15, 2013

Abraham Lincoln has been dead for nearly a century and a half, but we still seem fixated on what happened to him — or what might have happened to him, as we read in Daniel Stashower’s swift and detailed rendering of the first credible effort to end the life of the 16th president of the United States.

This account of the little-known ­Baltimore-based plot to assassinate Lincoln before his March 4, 1861, inaugural hurtles across a landscape of conspirators, heroes and politicos in hotel suites, ladies’ parlors and railway depots along Lincoln’s train route from Springfield, Ill., to Washington. We know the plotters did not succeed, of course, but the documents Stashower has unearthed give the strong indication that they might have made good on their intentions all too easily.

The real hero of “The Hour of Peril” is Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant and barrel-maker, whose drive for success married a quicksilver intellect to advance the nascent profession of private detective. (According to one theory, the term “private eye” comes from the image of an open eye on Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency logo.)

During the months between Lincoln’s election and the inauguration, Baltimore was the red-hot center of secessionist conspiracies. Early on, Pinkerton — who had been hired by the concerned president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad — sniffed assassination plots in the wind blowing from there; the city was situated in the volatile border state of Maryland, which would not secede from the Union, and John Wilkes Booth made his acting debut on the Baltimore stage.

Maryland was rife with hysterical personalities and opportunities for elaborate, shifting and improbable alliances. Pinkerton and his operatives identified an elegant, mustachioed Corsican immigrant barber named Cypriano Ferrandini as the hub of a network of Lincoln haters.

Into the den of this crew of potential cutthroats, Pinkerton dispatched his most trusted confidential agents, including Mrs. Kate Warne, a young widow who was the first female professional detective in America; she was hired by the wily Pinkerton, and it turned out to be one of the best management decisions he would ever make. Warne carried the most sensitive communications from Pinkerton to Lincoln’s inner circle in those final critical days in New York City, when Lincoln had to be diverted from his planned stop in Baltimore.

Pinkerton’s personal history and rise to national prominence dominate the book at first, but Stashower’s narrative generates a healthy head of steam. The story begins to build toward the happy avoidance of the cataclysm that would have befallen Lincoln and the nation in the unhappy precincts of Baltimore during late February 1861, had Pinkerton not managed to persuade the president-elect and his closest aides to follow a last-minute plan of evasion.

Since Lincoln has long since been deified on screen — portrayed by Walter Huston, Henry Fonda and most recently Daniel Day-Lewis — it can be difficult to recall how controversial a figure he once was. In his time, however, Lincoln was reviled — in the most vituperative language imaginable — as much as, or perhaps even more than, he was revered.

The Republic and the Constitution rose again, phoenixlike, from the conflagration of civil war, but President Lincoln did not — Booth made certain of that. We can be grateful, though, that Old Abe survived the first attempt on his life. And now we have the chance to relish the story of the clever and determined characters who were dedicated to his safety and to the cause for which, on April 15, 1865, he would ultimately surrender his life.

THE HOUR OF PERIL

The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War

By Daniel Stashower

Illustrated. 354 pp. Minotaur Books. $26.99.

Greg Tobin, most recently the author of “The Good Pope,” a biography of John XXIII, is writing a novel.